 The role of international and domestic R&D outsourcing for firm innovationMaría García-Vega and Elena Huergo Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019, vol. 157, issue C, 775-792 Abstract: Firms are increasingly outsourcing their high-tech services. Theory suggests that R&D outsourcing allows firms to specialize in core knowledge-intensive tasks, thereby increasing innovation, but R&D outsourcing may also undermine internal capabilities. Our goal is to empirically assess the relative importance of these two possibilities, distinguishing between national and international R&D outsourcing and firms’ exporting status. We examine R&D purchases of more than 10,000 Spanish firms for the period 2004–2014. We show that R&D outsourcing improves firm innovation. Product innovation rises mostly with domestic outsourcing, while process innovation increases with both domestic and international R&D outsourcing. In addition, we find that international outsourcing provides an extra premium, mostly for exporters. Our results contribute to a better understanding of how firms organize the production of knowledge and innovation. Keywords: R&D outsourcing; Transaction cost economics; Innovation; International versus domestic outsourcing; Exporters (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:157:y:2019:i:c:p:775-792 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2018.11.009 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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